Aug 8, 2014

"Finding Fela" movie

Documentarian Alex Gibney's "Finding Fela," about the legendary
African pop star and political activist, feels like a rough draft for a
very good movie.

Parts of it are stirring because the subject
matter is inherently noble. Fela Ransome Kuti, who died in 1997 at age
58, was multi-disciplinary songwriter, singer, bandleader and activist
who invented Afrobeat music, hooked up with the Black Panther Party
during a U.S. tour, then went home and mocked the dictatorial Nigerian
government throughout the 1970s. He also formed a commune, Kalakuta
Republic, that he declared a sovereign nation; started a nightclub
called the Afro-Spot in the Empire Hotel in Lagos, and embraced the
Yoruba faith, becoming a spiritual leader and even officiating at
weddings.

Most of all, he was a great pop protester, working in a
country where being that kind of performer required real sacrifice.
Kuti was arrested or detained by police over 200 times during his
career, and often the police actions were purely retaliatory harassment.
Kuti's music was compositionally bold but also danceable; commentator
Questlove as being in the spirit of Bob Marley's but requiring a "more
sophisticated ear."

But more than that, it was a vehicle for
messages of pride and defiance against Nigeria's repressive government,
particularly its brutal police. Kuti teased them in songs such as
"Zombie," "The Mosquito Song" and "Go Slow" (about the horrendous
traffic jams in the Nigerian capital of Lagos, which cops tried to speed
up by beating any drivers who didn't move quickly enough). The
movie never attempts even a speculative answer to the question of why a
notoriously thin-skinned and violent government allowed Kuti to mock
them openly over so many years. And yet if you don't know every detail
of the story, this vagueness works in the movie's favor; you worry that
just around the next bend lurks the moment when the government finally
gets fed up.

A life this packed with so much incident can't help
but be fascinating, especially when some of the incidents are personally
harrowing. Kuti's mother, the pioneering feminist and anti-colonialist
activist Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, was thrown out of a window when police
raided her son's compound, then lapsed into a coma and died. Kuti also
faced internal resentment and rebellion after his cousin emptied his
bank account and his once-loyal bandmembers became increasingly
disgruntled at having to play without being paid.

Was there
enough existing film footage and still photography to fill out a
feature-length documentary about Kuti without bringing in extensive
backstage footage of "Fela!", the Broadway music about him? Given the
film's two-hour running time, which wouldn't be so onerous if the pacing
weren't so lumpy, I have to wonder. Gibney and his crew jump between a
relatively straightforward documentary with talking heads and archival
imagery and a backstage, "making-of" type documentary, about artists
(including the show's director-choreographer Bill T. Jones) analyzing
Kuti's motivations and mindset, the better to guide a show's musicians
and dancers.

The film barely settles into one groove before it's
unceremoniously torn out of it. Both documentaries are good (though the
straightforward one, about the man himself, is rawer and more urgent
than the backstage one, which too often feels like an extended ad for
the still-touring musical); but you do often feel as though you're
watching different takes on the same subject glommed together. As a
portrait of a great artist and activist, "Finding Fela" is worth a look,
but it's Gibney's weakest work as a filmmaker.

There are at least two Felas in the documentary “Finding Fela.” One
is the actual Fela Kuti, the late Ni­ger­ian singer, musician and
pioneer of the Afrobeat musical style, who died of complications from
AIDS in 1997. The other is the title character in “Fela!,” the wildly popular off-Broadway musical which jumped to Broadway in 2009, garnering 11 Tony nominations and three wins.

The captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney (“The Armstrong Lie”)
is both a standard biography and a making-of movie, blending concert
and interview footage of Fela, as he was universally known (even to his
children), with scenes from rehearsals and performances of “Fela!”

At
times, early in the movie, you might wonder whether you’re watching the
real guy or the actor who played him onstage, Sahr Ngaujah. But the
real Fela had many more faces. Was he a politically progressive thorn in
the side of Nigeria’s military government (which jailed and beat him)
or a piggish sexist, who believed that women should be subservient to
men and who married 27 “queens” in a single 1978 ceremony?

Was
he a thoughtful and outspoken critic of corruption or a party-hearty
pothead, more interested in sparking giant spliffs than revolution? A
skeptical, Western-educated thinker or a naive dupe, known for traveling
around the country with his personal spiritual adviser, a Ghanaian
magician named Professor Hindu? A clear-eyed truth-teller or a man in
denial, who would insist, even when he started developing skin lesions
from Kaposi’s sarcoma near the end of his life, that he was simply
“shedding” his old skin?

The
answer is that he was probably all of these things, including the one,
unequivocal characterization: a musical genius. The film contains plenty
of snippets of his infectiously danceable, politically charged songs —
which commonly run on for 20 minutes or more, in sometimes
incomprehensible pidgin English — along with interviews with those
singing his praises. Paul McCartney and Roots bandleader Questlove are
among those who testify to Fela’s brilliance. But the man’s music, which
was influenced by Christian hymns, classical music, jazz, the soul
music of James Brown, Yoruba chant and horn- and guitar-heavy “highlife,” speaks loudest of all.

It
is for these reasons that Gibney’s film is called “Finding Fela.”
Gibney goes looking for him, guided by Bill T. Jones, who directed
“Fela!” On camera, Jones acts as a sort of safari leader, hacking away
at the thicket of thorny contradictions that surrounded Fela, in the
hopes of shaping a coherent yet honest portrait of the man.

Eventually,
over the course of two hours, that portrait emerges, not by cutting
away the weeds, but by allowing them to grow back.

Like Fela’s
complex, long-winded music, such a portrait requires time. One of Fela’s
colleagues reminisces about a conversation with a record-label rep, who
asked him, absurdly, exactly which “three-minute section” of a
half-hour Fela opus should be played on the radio. In order to find
Fela, you have to take in the whole picture. As “Fela!” costume designer
Marina Draghici puts it, that entails both a saint and a crazy man.

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